Laura Meets Jeffrey

by Jeffrey Michelson

  Okay. Game face. Overrule my emotions with my intellect. Ready to bring it. If self-confidence has its own pheromones, for the first time in a long time mine were turned on. If you’re not afraid to lose, you are more likely to win. I was ready to win.

  I’m starboard, nearest her, as she continues to wave her arm although there were no cabs in sight. I lean out the window and say with a blend of warmth and confidence, “Where are you going? Can we give you a lift?”

  She bends over, cautiously looks all over inside Freddy’s Mercedes, checks us out like a seasoned detective, pauses, then smiles. Up close I want her even more. She is thirty-something with an air of sophistication and big blue eyes, high forehead, striking blonde locks, and a cheerleader smile. She is a dish.

  “OK. I’m going to the UN Plaza Hotel. Can you do that?” Her Texan accent completes the package. She’s more than a dish; she’s a peach.

  “Sure,” I said. I jump out, open the back door and when she settles into the back seat, I ask what she’s doing tonight.

  “Going out on a date with a diplomat.”

  “Is he your boyfriend?” I ask.

  “Just someone I see from time to time.”

  I ask her lots of questions about herself, the most seductive tack a man can take. She’s a nurse. She loves her dog. She lives in a small studio in a fancy building on Lexington near Gramercy Park. She was a beauty queen in Beaumont, Texas. At the hotel I walk her into the lobby. I ask for her number and to my great surprise she gives it to me.

  Freddy and I continued on to the Upper West Side where we were entertained by two lovely co-eds he knew who were earning next semester’s tuition. We both contributed $100 to furthering their education, a decent sum in 1979 when street hookers were $10 to $25.

  I called Sherry the following week and on that phone call we had our very first argument. She wanted to go hear country music. I wanted to go dancing. How much more of a warning sign do two people need? I wanted to get into her skirt but what was her reason for staying on the phone? We compromised. If I got a limo she’d disco.

  2

  The world before Laura, part two

  October 1979–April 1980

  When I picked her up she looked hot, tall, maybe 5'11" in heels—almost my height—dressed country-sexy in a short cowgirl miniskirt, tight plaid western shirt with one more button open than one would expect, and a white cowboy hat. She was either wearing a padded push-up bra or had the same tits she had when she was seventeen. She had the clear super white skin that Neo-Nazis revere. She was every Jewish boy’s dream.

  We went to a dinner-dance club and ate an overpriced meal. She was bitchy and ill-humored. I asked her why she accepted the date. She said she’d been going out with older men for years and wanted to date someone around her own age. We discovered we didn’t like any of the same books, movies, restaurants, food, vacation destinations, colors, flowers, trees, poets, toothpaste, comedians, TV shows, politicians, or music. She said maybe she should stick with older guys. I was pissed. I’d wasted all this money and wouldn’t be getting laid.

  Then a miracle! I asked for a dance. She said yes. The first moment we touched I got hard. I looked in her eyes and it was also happening to her. Bam!! Some cheeky angel was fucking with us. Right there next to the table not even a foot toward the dance floor we started groping each other’s flesh. Her skin. Silk. Satin. Baby bottom. Butter lamb suede. Electric.

  “Lay-its go back to ma place,” she drawled.

  We started in the limo. As for the tits question, she wasn’t wearing a padded push-up bra. We finished in her apartment, exchanging a volley of compliments. She said: “I like that you have a hairy chest and not a hairy back.”

  I said: “I love your tits.”

  “I like being naked with a younger man.”

  “I love your ass.”

  “Your cock tastes like dessert.”

  “I love your tits.”

  “I really like the way you smell.”

  “I love your ass.”

  We stopped talking and made love for hours, that cheeky angel’s gift to keep us from arguing and/or killing each other. I came three times. I think she beat me by double.

  Next morning we started fighting immediately. It seemed whatever I did was wrong. I put the coffee mug in the wrong place. I left the toilet seat up. I used the wrong spoon.

  Each date we would bicker for foreplay, have wordless blinding sex that we both considered the best of our lives, sleep like angels, greet the morning with a royal fuck, and then get up and fight. I’d ask her to turn down the country music; she made it louder. I’d buy flowers; they’d be “ugly and cheap.” My patched hippie jeans were an embarrassment. She hated that I smoked “illegal” pot, but she defended her Dionysian consumption of alcohol, Valium and Percodan, even though she was a nurse.

  Even our dogs fought. She had an expensive pedigreed Lhasa Apso male, scarred by being named Muffy. I had Necort, also a male. Necort (pronounced “knee court”) was a forty-pound sweet apricot fluffy mutt who got along with everyone—humans, cats and other dogs—but had a low tolerance for hostility.

  One day while Sherry was bitching at me, Muffy attacked Necort, biting and growling abusive insults about his mixed breeding. Necort was about three times as big as Muffy, and would have killed him right there, but I stopped him because I wasn’t yet ready to give up the hottest sex of my life.

  This polarity of fucking and fighting went on for months. Our attraction was a diabolical Darwinian prank. She never wanted to break up. She said she loved me and love was hard. This was a woman who listened to way too much country music. I stuck in there because Mr. Penis overruled Mr. Brain. We spent New Year’s Eve 1980 together, but my half-filled champagne glass was half empty.

  The Greater National Ugly Mood amplified my homegrown funkitude. Americans were hostages in Iran and we all felt a bit like a bully was beating us up and stealing our lunch money every day in the schoolyard. The Soviets had just invaded Afghanistan. In February, Congress was rocked by Abscam, the FBI bribe sting that confirmed that my worst cynical fears about government weren’t cynical. Then it got worse.

  In early April 1980 one of my best friends, Malcolm Braly, writer, screenwriter, noted ex-convict and the world’s funniest giant leprechaun, died in an alcohol-fueled automobile accident. I went to Baltimore for his funeral and cried for three days. I didn’t know a person could cry that much.

  Later that sad month I watched the news on TV of the failed Iranian rescue mission and felt embarrassed, humiliated and sick in my stomach.

  3

  Enter Laura stage left

  Late April 1980

  It was a Friday morning in late April. Sherry and I had rotted to more venom than heat and on that particular morning we did not have sex. Sherry went off to work her shift. I took both dogs out for a walk. Muffy, having read Necort’s riot act, didn’t cross the line again, and our dogs were getting along better than their owners. The sun was shining, and it was one of those rare, clear, pollution-free days in Manhattan when you could actually smell the salt from the ocean.

  I’d recently stepped down as creative director of Puritan, the nation’s first—and for years the only—porn periodical with literary aspirations. We published Norman Mailer, Tennessee Williams and Hunter S. Thompson cheek-by-jowl with full frontal photos of people fucking. “Art you can jerk off to” was how I described it.

  I was once again a freelance art director, copywriter and journalist. In addition to regular clients, my penis still led me to do projects in the porn business.

  The best thing about the porn biz was that they paid C.O.D. By noon I was walking out of a porn mag publisher’s office with two grand in my pocket for some magazine work and for designing a label for a famous brand of butyl nitrate, a popular recreational legal drug at the time. The second-best thing about the porn biz was that once in a while I got to fuck a porn model.

  Here’s the deal on fucking porn models and porn actresses.
They are the core of the very few women who wake up in the morning and say, “Today I am going to look fabulous, smell wonderful and be the best fuck I can be.” Some of these women are in it for fame, some for the money and some, my personal favorites, are driven by pathological lust.

  If you eliminate the many porn babes who are not promiscuous off the set because they are married, they just aren’t sex-driven, or they only fuck guys for the money, what’s left is our control group. Now, if you’re a guy who is better looking, more charismatic and/or wealthier than me, and we both meet twenty of these most eligible hotties with willing vaginas, you might get to fuck five of them whereas I might only get to fuck three. I got to meet 100 of them, however, and you probably never met any.

  I had sex with a dozen second-and third-billing porn actresses and a few porn stars. Serena, Samantha and Gloria Leonard pop into my mind. Serena, my first, in 1976, was a big star at the time and at our first meeting, to my utter amazement, she seduced me.

  Samantha was a hot quickie in the empty Puritan office on the afternoon of the night in February 1978 when Ali lost to Spinks. She came by to pick up some copies of pictures from a shoot she did for us, and we did it right there in the art department. Afterward when I suggested we get together again she said, “No, but thank you. I have a boyfriend and our deal is I can only fuck a guy once. And you just had yours.”

  Gloria Leonard was the most notable because I never felt anyone have orgasms as intense as hers. At first I thought she was faking but then I thought, no, she’s too smart and too good an actress to think she could get away with this much overacting.

  And she wasn’t acting. Her body shuddered and her eyes rolled like she was shocked with electricity except it was all pleasure and no pain. I’d like to think it had something to do with me and it probably did but only a very little. This woman was just wired like this, which is probably why such a bright Jewish girl would become a porn star in the first place. Her climax was so big it made me jealous. In my head I was whining, “I want one, too.”

  I’d always fancied her and one night leaving a reception for some porn thing, we smiled at each other at the same time and soon were in her bed. She liked me enough to invite me back a few times. She kept having these 20-megaton nuclear blasts, and I got over being jealous and was just happy to be there having my own using conventional explosives.

  I’d been monogamous with Sherry since we met, but as I walked past 54th and Madison, the home of Eureka!, my favorite whorehouse in New York, my penis tapped me on the shoulder and suggested I go upstairs and have a peaceful, relaxing massage and fuck someone I didn’t hate.

  Eureka was on a high floor in a tall modern chrome and glass building. I got off the elevator and walked through a door marked “Executive Offices” and into a bland reception area with modern art on the walls, cushy leather sofas, a coffee table covered with finance and sports magazines, and a few high-backed expensive men’s club chairs studded with brass tacks. It could have been any other business in New York City that rented space and secretaries by the hour, day, week or month, with lots of different men coming and going. The girls were instructed to dress modestly, preferably in business clothes, until they got there and changed into their slutwear.

  Liz, the madam, sitting behind an antique desk, welcomed me warmly. “Well, hello, Jeffrey, it’s been a long time. And have we got a treat for you. A new girl—Laura—and we know you’re going to love her. Jeffrey…trust me…you must meet Laura. She’s an artist, you know, a bit crazy. Like you!”

  Liz was an attractive, late-thirties Polish blue-eyed blonde who passed herself off as late twenties and Swedish. She always spoke in the first person plural; the practice Mark Twain said should be limited to editors, royalty and people with tapeworms.

  Two years before, the first time I walked into her establishment, I found her struggling to design her Yellow Pages ad, business cards and matches. I offered my help and performed my skills right there in front of her. I wrote copy she loved, designed a logo and added the exclamation point. She was so impressed she gave me a girl for two hours for free (whom I tipped), and even invited me out to dinner. We had a short affair (we both wanted control in bed), but remained on good terms. I remained a good customer.

  I introduced lots of men to Eureka and steered some suitable working girls toward Liz, for which she would give me an occasional freebie. This was 1980. Pre-AIDS. Pre-herpes. Today if you hire a whore—and I haven’t in about three decades—I’m told it’s no kissing and mandatory rubbers. No kissing? Rubbers? That’s like being hungry and eating vitamin-enriched cardboard with protein powder and soybean oil, and calling it dinner.

  No, this was a different era. It was kissing and hugging and oral and anal and skin-to-skin and it was just like having sex with your girlfriend or wife except without the aggravation. The girl’s enthusiasm level was high, she always acted horny and she appeared to care about you. That’s the package you get from a real professional.

  I was led into one of a dozen stark, clean, small rooms, each with a double bed resting on a low platform and a large mirror and an innocuous landscape print on the wall. I sat down on a cheap Danish Modern wooden chair. The bed was made with clean sheets, two pillows and one light blanket. Eureka was always spotless, with a Eucalyptus aroma that gave me the feeling that in the event of an emergency it would be a safe place to have open-heart surgery.

  A parade of girls in lingerie began. Each smiled seductively, told me her name and promised with her body language to give me a good time. The ambitious ones came over and touched my arm or cheek. As usual, it was an unusually attractive and diverse group. Diversity is basic whorehouse marketing. Not every man wants a tall thin young blonde with big tits. Some prefer little brunette spinners, some want mature, some want Hispanic or black or Asian or punk or biker or redheads or small-breasted librarians with glasses. Not every whorehouse covers every base, but they try. New girls are necessary no matter what their look, so in addition to franchise players, there are lots of free agents. Some guys love going back to the same girl every time. They like the relaxation and security, but many guys are always looking for someone new.

  You see everyone and choose the one you want. It’s a very powerful feeling and one of the reasons there have always been whorehouses. I bet there was a cave in France with drawings of horses on the wall where you could choose between Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal.

  The Pussy Parade featured a few girls I had been with before: the lovely light mocha Thai girl who always smelled of coconut oil and loved to kiss and could squeeze your dick with her vagina so hard you almost couldn’t pull it out. She timed her squeezes to your climax. She was a favorite of mine.

  Then there was the redhead with nearly transparent white skin, who always smiled, always had pot, used to work on the streets, and now had three kids who were taken care of every day by her househusband, who, with all due irony, had originally been her pimp. She was fun and loved being fucked really hard.

  There was the tiny Chinese woman of indeterminate age who always cleaned your asshole with Lavoris and would then suck it; the fabulous-looking, elegant, middle-aged woman who specialized in first-timers, and the 6'1" black girl with slender hips and shaved pubes who always wore 6”-high heels, loved to do it doggie style, and wouldn’t kiss.

  Then a girl stumbles in. The day is young and already she’s drunk or stoned or both. She’s laughing like someone just told her the punch line to the week’s best joke. She’s holding on to the doorway to keep her balance. She has long, wavy, light brown hair, twinkling green/hazel eyes that look blue at some angles, luminous light olive skin, and enough cheekbones for three Cherokee Indians. She looks like Margo Kidder with Brooke Shields eyebrows.

  She’s wearing dime-store-tacky pink negligee and panties, with pink ribbons in her hair. Her breasts, medium with giant, disproportionate nipples, are falling out. Her makeup is minimal, just pink lipstick, quite unlike the other more painted ladies. Standing barefoot she
must be about 5'8" if she could stand up straight. Her smile is infectious. She is not like any whore I ever met. I want her.

  “My name is Laura. Liz said I had to meet you. Do you have any drugs?”

  “No,” I laugh.

  “Well, Liz says you’ll probably choose me, so I’ll bring my own. Just please don’t tell her.” And Laura somehow does a pirouette and manages, almost gracefully, an exit. Her bum, although not a bubble, is fleshy enough to make my eyes happy.

  I pay my $35 and choose Laura.

  4

  Falling in love in a whorehouse

  Ten minutes later

  Laura is undressing me in the huge bathroom down the hall. We’re smoking her joint. She draws my bubble bath and I get in the oversized claw-foot tub. Instead of washing me from outside the bath, which is customary, she strips and climbs in. Her body is long and lean. Her nipples are big as organ stops, and her ass is round and childlike cute.

  I lie back in the tub with her between my legs. All of a sudden her hands are under my bottom pushing me up so my dick is out of the water and in a flash her mouth is on it. This surprises me as the cock-in-mouth stage usually comes later in the session. She starts at the tip to squeegee the bubbles off, quickly making it hard with short sucking bursts.

  My God! What a warm mouth.

  Laura takes a break and asks, “Oh, what’s your name?” It was right there that I felt the first lightning bolt of love. Here was a woman who sucks your dick first and asks your name second.